We asked college faculty members and administrators to share their memories and reflections about where they were 40 years ago during the Summer of Love, 1967. Some were flying their freak flags; others were flying missions over Vietnam. Some said they felt part of a pivotal historical moment; others were just trying to survive lousy summer jobs. Deeply felt politics mingled with casually observed spectacle. It was light-years ago. And it was just yesterday.
Theodore Roszak, emeritus professor of history, California State University-East Bay: Maybe it was an advantage that I was 5,000 miles away when the Summer of Love happened. I had taken a leave from my teaching job and was living in London, editing a small pacifist journal and working on a series of articles for The Nation dealing with campus protest. The articles would eventually become a book titled The Making of a Counter Culture. That title emerged in large measure from the reports that were arriving in England from the streets of San Francisco, a bemused journalistic chronicle of young Americans experimenting with a zany lifestyle that might not outlast the summer, but which certainly made a blazing statement of dissent. From that distance, I had little to work from except sardonic commentary in the British press and sensational images of blissed-out youth cavorting in Golden Gate Park.
The coverage that came my way typified the European fascination with wild and wacky California. But by then I was convinced there was more to these matters than sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Not that sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll didn’t matter. They were the most forceful expression of the statement. But could that statement be given a more accessible philosophical translation? That was the task I set myself, giving my attention mainly to a group of influential thinkers (among them Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, Norman Brown, Paul Goodman, and Alan Watts) who were raising significant questions about the dominant reality principle of the modern world.
Remember, this was the era when, on both sides of the cold war, science and technology had signed on with the military-industrial complex, leaving the world to wonder how soon the missiles would fly and the sky catch fire; “mad rationality,” as Lewis Mumford so aptly put it.
What I sensed beneath the surface of youthful dissent was the spontaneous emergence of a subterranean tradition that reached back to the early days of industrial revolution, a “cry of the heart” first voiced by romantic poets and artists against the “dark, Satanic mills” that were desiccating the human spirit and the natural world. A counter culture. That’s what I saw in the ebullience of Haight-Ashbury for that one brief interval in 1967. It didn’t last long, but it didn’t have to. The lines had been drawn and the issue joined.
ON THE ROAD
John Burks, professor of journalism, San Francisco State University: Never fought in Vietnam; too tall to be drafted. Never was a hippie. My “professional” life didn’t permit that, but I absolutely did indulge in the pleasures of the day, and also in the activism, protest against the Vietnam War in particular. Meanwhile, as a journalist, I kept busy “covering” dope, sex, cheap thrills, and the antiwar movement. Playing both sides: good citizenship.
Departed San Francisco in 67 at what, to lots of us, seemed like The End of Hippie; I wanted to see What Else. (I thought in capital letters about the big stuff back then. Lots of us did.) I took a year off from my job as a Newsweek correspondent to see the world, or anyhow a swath of it — an adventure that took me to Mexico, England, Ireland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
Discovered lots of Else out there. Threw myself into a wild, seemingly endless, antiwar festival in London; jammed for hours with Turk village musicians; felt the strange commingling of mighty spirit and towering anxiety in (then-Jordanian) Jerusalem in the weeks before the Six Day War.
Returned to San Francisco and got back to work. Wrote not a word about my trip for Newsweek, but did freelance several pieces for The Village Voice, Holiday, Down Beat, others. My jaunt presaged a major career turnaround, culminating in my signing on as first managing editor at Rolling Stone, but that’s a story for another day.
Cary Nelson, professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: In the months leading up to the summer of 1967 I was completing my undergraduate degree at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Antioch had actually hired me part time as a draft counselor, and that job continued into June. In the midst of the Vietnam War and at America’s most progressive college, draft counseling really meant draft-avoidance counseling. My main task was organizing student access to a group of increasingly politicized psychiatrists willing to write letters for people, saying they were unfit to serve.
Then my partner, Paula Treichler, and I decided to take a vacation before beginning graduate school at the University of Rochester. We purchased a used Nash Rambler with seats that folded down. It would provide both transportation and sleeping quarters, or so we planned. The one little hitch was that I had never learned to drive. Paula would teach me on the back roads of Kentucky and Texas on the way to Mexico City. My equilibrium suffered a major setback the very first day, when the speedometer broke, which meant that I, as a novice driver, had no way to estimate how fast we were going. Since I also seemed unable to master the clutch, Paula would sit next to me and depress the clutch with her left foot while I drove. Things came to a head one day and night in Mexico City, when I broke down in tears trying to negotiate the traffic. We ended up in a campground patrolled by Dobermans, who kept leaping on our car. We agreed to drive straight back, eventually arriving at our destination in Rochester, a journey all evidence suggested had taken place not only in space but also in time. After Antioch, it seemed we had lost a decade of countercultural time.
WEEKEND HIPPIES
James Brock, professor of management, Susquehanna University: I was living in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, having moved there upon my graduation from Berkeley in June of 66. I was in a master’s program in sociology at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) and working as a secretary at the downtown YMCA and as a tennis instructor at a private girls’ school. Yes, I was trying to avoid the draft, but higher education ran in my family. Dad was a professor; my uncle a surgeon. My girlfriend lived on Delmar Street, about a block from the Haight and only three blocks from Golden Gate Park, where we regularly saw free concerts of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and many others. I was a hippie in many respects — long hair, earring, bell-bottom pants, and lots of incense. I regularly marched to protest the war at the People’s Park demonstrations back in Berkeley. I drove an old Triumph 500 motorcycle, drank lots of cheap red wine, and inhaled. However, I also was a full-time graduate student with part-time jobs to support myself frugally and responsibly.
There was optimism and genuine love for humanity in the air that summer, openness to new experiences, innocence and trust. People shared what little they had and didn’t worry about tomorrow. Those attitudes changed, of course, even by the following year, as some went back to school or joined the Peace Corps, while others became more jaded, exploitative, strung out, dependent, and hard core. Most of us knew that the magic of that Summer of Love could not last forever, but at the time, it truly was magical.
Linda Saulsby, acting director and adjunct associate professor, graduate liberal-studies program, Saint Mary’s College of California: We were black kids born and raised in San Francisco of parents who migrated from the South to build a better life. My friends and I never fully embraced the peace-and-love movement that defined our beautiful hometown during those years — our parents declared it was the nonsense of white kids. Nonetheless, we put on our old, faded jeans and T-shirts and spent many glorious afternoons as “weekend hippies” on the panhandle of Golden Gate Park at rallies, demonstrations, and just hanging out. Boys I went to high school with have their names carved on the Veterans Memorial in Washington. With the exception of a good friend who had a big chunk of his right arm blown off one morning just south of Cu Chi, the men in our circle of friends survived the ravages of the war relatively intact.
We invested a lot of emotional capital in both the civil-rights and antiwar movements, but we were not radicals.
We realized that we, too, were affected by America’s institutional racism, albeit the California version. We embraced the Summer of Love with intentional flirtation, but not total commitment.
David J. DeRose, chair, department of English and drama, Saint Mary’s College of California: Forty years ago, my family — my parents; my older siblings, aged 13, 14, and 15; and myself, aged 9 — piled into our 1963 Chrysler New Yorker and drove about an hour north of our suburban home in San Jose to San Francisco for no other reason that I can recall than to cruise down Haight Street and witness the “Summer of Love” first hand. I don’t know if my brother or one of my sisters requested the trip, but my parents must have been interested enough in “seeing the hippies” that they agreed. My family almost never ventured into San Francisco. In fact, my only other childhood recollections of San Francisco are infrequent trips to the zoo and/or the aquarium. Our day in the Haight was very much like those other trips. We never left the safety of our car, staying behind glass and only being allowed to lower the windows after much protestation. We kept our hands in the vehicle, didn’t rattle the cages of the inhabitants, and moved along in the steady stream of our fellow tourists past the colorful exhibits. It was the first time in my life I received a pamphlet from somebody on the street, and the first time (outside of church) that I had ever smelled incense. At least I was told it was incense.
VIETNAM
William Foley, associate professor of accounting, Saint Leo University: In June I went to Vietnam as part of the first group of pilots to join the Navy’s first and last helicopter attack squadron, called HAL-3. I spent a year there piloting H-1 Huey gunships to support naval-patrol-boat operations in the IV Corp area of South Vietnam. HAL-3 was the most decorated squadron of the Navy in Vietnam. I was awarded 39 air medals, including the Navy Accommodation Medal and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. I am proud of my service to my country and the men who served with me, especially those I knew who died there. No matter what someone thinks of that war, brave men and women should be remembered and thanked for their service. I certainly have kept them in my daily prayers and will continue to do so.
William Seraile, professor of African-American history, Herbert H. Lehman College, City University of New York: I went to Vietnam in 1967, not as a soldier but as a volunteer English teacher with International Voluntary Service, an organization similar to the Peace Corps. I couldn’t teach because my school was converted into a refugee center. I volunteered as a scrubber in the operating ward of the local hospital, where wounded civilian victims of the war received surgery — everything from brain surgery to amputations.
I also did volunteer work at an orphanage, where I discovered that children who looked like me (African-American) would never amount to anything more than a prostitute (for girls) or pimp or street hustler (for boys). My distaste for the war and for the lies that I witnessed while the American military predicted victory disillusioned me. I left Vietnam after only seven months’ service because my personal safety was at stake and a friend had been kidnapped. (He would spend five years in North Vietnam.)
I returned to New York but did not participate in any antiwar marches because the protesters were concerned about the loss of American lives — no one seemed to care about the loss of Vietnamese lives or the destruction of their culture. I protested in my own way by sending Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a peace candidate for the presidency, antiwar poetry written by Vietnamese dissenters and by sharing my views in a radio interview.
There was no love for me to celebrate during the Summer of Love. I remember the amputations, the gangrened limbs, and the anguished cries of so-called stoic Vietnamese who gazed upon the lifeless eyes of children, dead before they had entered school. My experience in Vietnam taught me never to trust the U.S. government’s spin on events. Government lies are as common and persistent as raindrops.
SPRINGTIME OF THE REVOLUTION
Michael Kazin, professor of history, Georgetown University: Having completed my first year in college, I imagined I was living in the springtime of the revolution. So naturally I spent the summer of 67 trying to nurture its buds. I attended my first convention of Students for a Democratic Society, in Ann Arbor, where network TV filmed our debates about how to stop the draft — and the national leaders all dropped LSD. Then I took a job in the SDS regional office in New York City, soaking up what passed for wisdom from people like Mark Rudd and Dave Gilbert, who, two years later, would be founders of Weatherman. We sponsored a talk by the SNCC firebrand H. Rap Brown and a conference of student radicals from Europe. Everyone I knew seemed to be reading Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?, which proclaimed guerilla war as the salvation of the third world.
But politics didn’t take up all that many evenings. I went to smoke-ins in Tompkins Square Park, heard the Fugs play at a tiny theater nearby where my girlfriend sold tickets. Sometime in August, she and I spent a long, tense day at Jones Beach, quarreled that evening, and broke up the next morning. But I was just 19, healthy, and headed back to Harvard. Everything mattered, which was fine by me.
Jane Bernstein, professor of English and creative writing, Carnegie Mellon University: I was working as a typist in a drab midtown-Manhattan office, feeling as if the summer would never end and I would live out the rest of my days commuting to a New York that bore no relation to the New York where I would move in September. It seemed as if all I did was breathe bus fumes and roll triplicate invoices onto my typewriter carriage.
One day at lunchtime, I found the Union Square office of SDS. I knew that SDS stood for Students for a Democratic Society, that the students who belonged were against the war in Vietnam. My older sister had been a member before her death. I didn’t have the courage to walk into that office, but I mailed a letter written in fuchsia ink. “hi! i’m jane! I’ll be a freshman at nyu in the fall. can you please tell me how I can join sds when I get there?”
Getting the response — contact information at the bottom of my letter — was like getting a love letter. Everything about it thrilled me, including the greeting, “Dear Jane.” It allowed me to believe that the summer would end and that my life would change. And it did. Radically.
David Horowitz, writer and conservative activist: I missed the Summer of Love. I was living in a two-room basement flat near Hampstead Heath in normally dank and dreary London. I don’t remember anyone holding a Summer of Love in London — it was probably too cold. I probably wouldn’t have participated if they did. I had three kids in a nuclear family and had never been high. I was a fairly humorless Marxist and would not hear a live electric guitar until the following year, when I moved back to Berkeley (I still remember the band’s name, Purple Earthquake — I loved it). I worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and facilitated a meeting between Lord Russell and Joan Baez, which was somewhat problematic since neither of them had the foggiest idea who the other was. I organized and wrote manifestos for the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, a little “vanguard” opposing the Vietnam War. Of course, as with every other leftist antiwar vanguard, our “solidarity” was with the Communists, not the Vietnamese, and we were not against war, just America’s wars. When I wasn’t plotting revolution, I was finishing a book called Empire and Revolution (seriously) and trying to figure out how I was going to get back home.
FEELING BAD, DOING GOOD
Ronald A. Crutcher, president, Wheaton College: Rather than invoking images of flower children dancing in the California sun, the Summer of Love reminds me of the anger that boiled over as riots broke out in deteriorating, segregated urban neighborhoods such as the community in which I was raised in Cincinnati. A rising junior at Miami University in Ohio, I spent the summer working as a playground supervisor at an inner-city school in Cincinnati. It was the first time in five years that I had not spent the summer attending a music camp or festival. The contrast in outlook was strangely shocking. Without the opportunities that high-quality education provided, the children I worked with that summer saw their future as bleak, their lives as offering few choices for betterment. Toward the end of the summer, I witnessed from a distance the incident that sparked the riots in Cincinnati. It began literally within a stone’s throw from our home in Avondale. I watched in disbelief as the police pushed back the growing crowd. For the first time in my life, I smelled tear gas, forcing me to return to the house. The violence devastated whole blocks. I came to a new appreciation of all that my education was affording me, and for the first time I truly appreciated the values and unconditional love that I had received from my parents.
Gail H. McKee, associate professor of business administration, Roanoke College: College was finished. I had just graduated. The National Council of Churches advertised for summer workers. I volunteered. My assignment was to be part of an interracial team in Clearwater, Fla. During the day, we worked in a black neighborhood, trying to ensure that residents received needed services. During the evening, we lived in a white neighborhood, trying to integrate it.
Both neighborhoods were quiet during the day. The 90-plus-degree temperature ensured such quietude. However, during the evening the black community came alive. People had to be outside to find cooler space. In contrast, the streets of the white neighborhood remained generally vacant. The only sound was the whir of air conditioners.
One evening several team members and I — two of us were white women, the others black men — were walking those empty streets. Suddenly a car of white teenagers stopped. The young men rolled down their windows and yelled to the other woman and myself, “You white sluts!” Racism injures everyone.
One day I visited some of the poorest residents in the black community. I had trouble keeping my eyes from the roaches and other insects moving across their stove, onto the kitchen table and along the chairs. I felt embarrassed at my desire to brush myself off after leaving the house, especially when the people living there were so kind and hospitable to me. Poverty hurts everyone.
It was a good learning experience. My only regret: I received more than I gave.
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
James Wright, president, Dartmouth College: It is hard to remember 1967 as the “Summer of Love.” Although a student, I was a long way from San Francisco or Monterey. Married with three children, the youngest of whom was three years old, I was pursuing my doctorate in American history from the University of Wisconsin, working with the great Western historian Allan Bogue. I was just beginning my dissertation research on populism, and that summer, I piled the whole family into our old Chevy station wagon — which was not air-conditioned, of course — and drove from Madison to Boulder, taking the slow route through the Dakotas. The AM car radio played Otis Redding, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, as well as, given where we were, Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. And we followed updates on the Six Day War.
In Boulder we spent the summer in a house on 13th Street across from Beach Park, a gathering place for University of Colorado students and the counterculture. We could catch the whiff of marijuana and listen to the music. I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. I worked in the libraries all day, but in the evenings we watched on television with horror the race riots in Detroit, Newark, Washington, and elsewhere. Public opinion on the Vietnam War had begun to turn extremely negative, and I joined in that opposition. Just a few years earlier I had served in the Marines myself, and so I sympathized with the young troops in Vietnam who had been given an impossible assignment. It was not really a summer of love.
Marjorie Perloff, emerita professor of English, Stanford University: In the summer of 67, I was 36, rather too old to be a flower child, and my two daughters Nancy (11) and Carey (8) were too young. Living in the national’s capital, I should have known all about the Summer of Love, but I didn’t give it a thought. In those days, I never had time to read The Washington Post. It was my second year as an assistant professor at the Catholic University in Washington, and I had no time to waste. I was writing an essay on “spatial form” in Yeats that took much library work. In any case, running a house, taking care of the children, keeping up with all the lit crit and theory coming hot off the presses, planning my fall courses, and trying to spend time with my husband and friends left little time for reflections on Haight-Ashbury. But drugs had hit the formerly staid Catholic University, and I recall that in 67, a student I vaguely had a crush on disappeared one day: Evidently his parents had to take him home. And a student couple I knew were rumored to have jumped off a ferris wheel while high. None of it really registered. Years later, when I was good friends with Allen Ginsberg and wrote about him and the San Francisco poetry scene, I wondered, Where had I been in 1967?
Daphne Patai, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Massachusetts at Amherst: Were it not for old letters in the basement, I would only vaguely recall what I was doing in the summer of 1967. But the letters tell me that I was working as a secretary in the economics department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, reading Hermann Hesse, Jung, Freud, and Bettelheim. At 23 years of age, I was between things that summer: three years out of college and totally unfocused; not yet resolved to go to graduate school; not quite out of a brief first marriage but already in love with a man I would marry 13 years later; not yet having gone to Brazil, which would move me to get a Ph.D. in that area and to the life of a professor and writer — the life I still lead today.
Perhaps most interesting to me in those old letters (which I have not looked at between that time and today) is hearing myself voice the standard leftist politics of the time, the antiwar attitudes, the pro-Communism based on ignorance and idealism, the deep and irrational antagonism toward this country. Today I find versions of those letters in newspapers on a daily basis, as antiwar activists talk the same talk: different world, different war; same rhetoric, same antagonism to one’s own country and its government. Only today I no longer hold those views. Today I have neither the time to pretend that my country is the worst in the world, nor the desire to engage in the “oppositional” politics that are now the tedious norm in academe. Today I know that life is brief and full of dangers, and that there is much to do.
Leon Botstein, president, Bard College: The Summer of Love passed me by. Having been a premature adult, I was not a candidate to be a hippie. As an immigrant, I was not inclined to drop out. With an internship as an urban fellow in New York City Mayor John Lindsay’s administration, I thought I could substitute a contribution to resolving the urban crisis for involvement in Vietnam, a war I, like so many others, opposed. What those turbulent years did is to lead me first into public service before I embarked on my career in music.
The Summer of Love was a turning point away from politics toward a mysticism, drug culture, and anti-intellectualism that ultimately made a mockery of disciplined thought and discouraged the appreciation of and engagement with science. After 1970, when I became president of Franconia College, at the age of 23, a spirit of wild-eyed utopianism flourished in the context of a rage among young people toward the war, inequality, and injustice that increasingly was turned outward at older adults and inward with more than an edge of personal pain.
One ought to remember that era without nostalgia and with the recollection that as the energy and organization of the 60s descended into violence and escapism, a reaction was brewing that turned the anti-intellectualism of the left into the equally anti-intellectual moral absolutism of today’s neoconservatism. Radical as that era seems in retrospect, it has been more than matched by the disasters wreaked by the extreme right.
If the revival of religion in public life and the intolerance of reasoned critical debate are legacies of reactionary conservatism, then the fundamental reshaping of the role of women in politics and the workplace and the slow but marked improvements in majority attitudes toward minorities are the positive residues of the 60s. The hammer blow of reaction against the perception of moral collapse, however, has done more damage than the late 60s and early 70s ever did. No matter one’s political beliefs, one familiar quip from from that time is worth remembering. If one were forced to choose between simplistic extremes, I’d rather live with fellow citizens who, in a free society, would choose love over war.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 44, Page B6